Figure 30.—Exteriors (left) and interiors of gravel-tempered sherds. Top to bottom: rim of small bowl; rim of small jar with internal flange to receive cover; and pipkin handle. Colonial National Historical Park. (From Smithsonian photos 43039-C, 43039-D.)
Ovens: (1) One wholly reconstructed oven at Jamestown. Made in sections on drape molds: base, two sides, two halves of top, opening frame, and door. Side and top sections are joined with seams, reinforced by finger impressions, meeting at top of trapezoidal opening. The opening was molded separately and joined with thumb-impressed reinforcements. A flat door with heavy vertical handle, round in section, fits snugly into opening. Thickness varies from ¾″ to 1½″. Unglazed, although smears of glaze dripped during the firing indicate that the oven was fired with glazed utensils stacked above it. (Fig. 10.)
(2) Oven in place in Bowne House, Flushing, Long Island. Similar in shape to Jamestown oven. Opening is arched.
(3) Body sherd and handle sherds at Jamestown, from additional oven or ovens.
(4) Body sherd from dome-top oven similar to those at Jamestown and Flushing. John Howland House site, Rocky Nook, Kingston, Plymouth County, Massachusetts. (Fig. 26.)
Comparative Evidence
Paste color, temper, and texture are consistent when examined microscopically. Resemblance is very close between oven sherds from the Jamestown and Howland house sites, and between these and a large chip obtained from the Smithsonian’s oven purchased in Bideford. Except for a somewhat lower proportion of temper, utensil sherds from various sites are consistent with the oven fragments. The Smithsonian’s 19th-century Bideford pan also closely resembles these, except for the proportion of temper, which is somewhat less. Further close resemblance of form exists between the Jamestown and Flushing ovens and those in the Bideford Museum. (Figs. 7, 9.)
In 1954 comparative tests were made by Frederick H. Norton, professor of ceramics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jamestown clay was used for a control. Thin sections, made of sherds found at Jamestown, were fired at several temperatures and the results recorded in photomicrographs. Of the gravel-tempered sherd submitted in these tests, Professor Norton commented, “The clay mass looks quite dissimilar from the Jamestown clay.”
No other identifiable English ware of this period compares with the gravel-tempered pottery, the use of gravel for temper apparently being restricted to North Devon. Gravel is found in red earthenware sherds from Spanish colonial sites and in olive oil jars of Hispanic origin, but both the quality and proportion of temper differs, as do the paste characteristics, so that no possibility exists for confusion between them and the North Devon ware.